Under the Loving Care of the Fatherly Leader: North Korea and the Kim Dynasty (35 page)

In Pyongyang, at the Children’s Palace, a soldier packing a pistol guarded the lobby as visitors from abroad arrived for an evening performance by school-aged youngsters enrolled in afternoon performing-arts classes. One of the lavishly staged skits dramatized the youthful exploits of Kim Il-sung in guerrilla warfare against the Japanese. As children on the stage chased others who were done up as caricatures of grinning, bo-wing Japanese, with enormous papier-mâché heads, an English translation of the pursuers’ call was projected on a screen: “Let’s march forward, following our commander, to annihilate the Japs to the last man.”

The day I visited the Chonsam-ri cooperative farm, a nursery school teacher was leading her four-year-old charges in one of their favorite exercises. Holding aloft a toy rifle, she called out, “How do we shoot the rifle?”

“Pull the trigger! Pull the trigger!” the little ones responded in unison, shouting at the tops of their lungs.

I quickly learned that North Korean officials took immense pride in the country’s elaborate, state-financed system of nurseries, schools, “children’s palaces,” colleges, universities, courses for workers at their job sites and correspondence courses. Of the population of 17 million, some 8 million were enrolled, paying no fees. The society, officials said, was being “intellectualized.”
¹⁹

The basis of the system was composed of nurseries followed by compulsory education from kindergarten through tenth grade. Matriculation came when
a baby, only a few weeks old, was sent to a nursery at the mother’s workplace. The children would stay there from early morning until late evening. The mothers were permitted breaks from their work to feed them. After regular classes, the state kept school-aged youngsters busy with supervised activities. Youngsters might end up spending only an hour or two a day with their parents, if that much. North Korea had been one of the first Asian countries to extend free public education as far as grade ten, and that in itself was an undeniably impressive accomplishment. As a Westerner, though, I could not help finding a sinister aspect to the system’s near monopoly on children’s upbringing and the direction in which it guided them.

Official propaganda claimed on one level that the children themselves were the beneficiaries of the approach. “In this country,” President Kim had said, “children are the kings.” His disciples rhapsodically reported that the Great Leader would do anything for the children, and that the educational system was a manifestation of his boundless love for them.

I visited a Pyongyang weekly boarding nursery, whose tiny charges spent only Saturday nights and Sundays with their families. The director said enthusiastically that they “grow faster and learn more than if they were at home.” Mean-while, tots in her nursery competed in a relay race to see which of two teams could be first to complete sentences such as “We are happy” and “We have nothing to envy in the world.” Two-year-olds in the showplace nursery were counting apples displayed on a visual aid: “These are four and one more makes five.” In a room decorated with models of President Kim’s birthplace, little ones showed the proper attitude to the Great Leader by reciting stories of his childhood and bo-wing before his boyhood portrait. By the time children reached kindergarten age, they would have learned to say, when they received their snacks, “Thank you, Great Fatherly Leader.”

Sometimes it was the parents who were said to benefit from the country’s educational system. Mothers were “liberated” for “political, economic and cultural life,” the nursery director said. At the mammoth Pyongyang Children’s Palace, an official explained that having the state in charge of children not only in school but after school meant that “parents do not have to worry about the children’s education.” The “palace” kept ten thousand middle school and high school students busy from 4 P.M. to 7 P.M. daily-with classes—some rather advanced—in music, arts, crafts, vocational subjects, sports, gymnastics and communist ideology. Provincial capitals offered similar if somewhat smaller facilities.

On another level, Kim Il-sung himself had indicated that benefits flowing from the educational system to parents and children as individuals were not really what he had in mind. Rather, the education system was intended to
benefit the collective mass of the people. After all, as Kim told a national meeting of teachers in a key speech in 1971, “in any society the primary aim of education lies in training people to faithfully serve the existing social system.” Echoing Friedrich Engels, Kim argued that the socialist state must “prevent the old ideas of their parents from exerting influence on children’s minds.” Children would be taught to be militant revolutionaries. “We must educate the students to hate the landlord and capitalist classes and the exploiting system,” Kim said. “If we neglect the education of the rising generation on such lines, they-will lose sight of the class enemies and, lapsing into a pacifistic mood, hate to make revolution and, in the end, may degenerate and become depraved.”

Any stray impulses to go in a different direction would be rooted out. Children in a socialist society, Kim said, should be guided “to reject individualism and selfishness, love the organization and the collective, and struggle devotedly for the sake of society and the people and the party and the revolution.”

I saw just how seriously North Koreans took that struggle for uniformity and against individualism when I went to the Taedongmun Primary School in Pyongyang. Teachers in classrooms I visited were posing questions to classes studying, variously, birds, evaporation and the revolutionary deeds of President Kim. Upon hearing each question, the pupils, sitting perfectly erect and still at their desks, all raised their hands, barked in unison, “Me!” and then instantly fell quiet again. Whenever any pupil was called upon, he or she marched to the front of the room, stood at attention and shouted out the memorized answer in a high-pitched monotone like the one used by West Point plebes to address upperclass cadets. Among the pupils who were not called upon, no one stirred; no one whispered.

Chung Kwang-chun, the principal, bragged in an interview that this was an “all-As school.” A single teacher had charge of the same group of pupils as they passed through all four grades, she said. That teacher was responsible for making sure—through extra work, if necessary—that all members of the class progressed well. “In the final analysis, we don’t believe there are people who can’t learn and can’t study,” Mrs. Chung said. She enumerated the most important subjects taught at the school, in this order: (1) “the revolutionary activities of the Great Leader,” (2) communist morality, (3) reading, (4) math. Actually, in the forty-three pages of the Great Leader’s important 1971 speech, “On the Thorough Implementation of the Principles of Socialist Pedagogy in Education,” he had not mentioned either reading or math.

At the time of the Korean War, Confucian filial piety had remained enough of a force that parents still had taken first place, even in Kim Il-sung’s rhetoric. Speaking with the army corps commander leading the battle of Heartbreak
Ridge, Kim supposedly told him he wanted the soldiers to “realize that it is the wish of their parents and the Party’s line that not even an inch of the sacred soil of the fatherland be yielded to the enemy. …” When his words were duly conveyed to the men, “moved by their Leader’s love, all rubbed their eyes with their fists” and pledged to do as parents and party asked.
²⁰

More recently however, Kim had been talking about “revolutionizing the homes,
²¹
and I began to get some concrete idea of-what that meant. When I asked Principal Chung about parents’ role in their children’s education, she said they were allowed to visit the school, and ought to help the pupils with their studies. She added, however, that parents were not called in for disciplinary problems, which were handled with teacher persuasion (no corporal punishment) and—through the school’s Young Pioneers–style children’s corps—peer criticism.

Actually, Mrs. Chung said, there were few behavior problems. The pupils hardly ever fought among themselves, even outside class, because “we are educating them in communist morality.” She was proud of the discipline of her students. Sitting up straight in class was required for health reasons, she said. Outside class the pupils were free to slouch if they liked—“but as we teach them the healthful way they always follow that way” Even as she spoke, I heard from the playground the unmistakable sound of schoolchildren at recess, whooping and running around. Relieved by this return to recognizable reality, I stepped to the window to photograph the scene. Mrs. Chung, however, quickly spoke to my interpreter—-who strode over and grasped my arm before I could click the shutter. Those two explained, patiently and in excruciatingly friendly fashion, that such a photograph of unorganized activity might make a bad impression abroad.

Quite the contrary, I replied. Americans and many other Westerners would be favorably impressed by such evidence that at least a little freedom survived in such a rigidly controlled society.

My interpreter, though, would not buy the argument. North Koreans valued unity, he explained earnestly. As for the schoolchildren, “we are educating them in a unitary idea—thinking in the same way and acting in the same way” The playground picture, unfortunately, would not illustrate that.
²²

Even at the time of my first visit, such thinking—no matter how passionately taught by earnest ideologues—-was in decline in many other communist countries. Kim Il-sung himself had warned North Korean teachers to guard against the trend in some socialist countries for the young to seek “a fast and indolent life.” Such a development in North Korea could result in slowed
economic growth, he had warned. The children must be educated to “love labor.” They must be “working-classized,” and taught to “have faith in communism before anything else.” Later, in his memoirs, he blamed the Khrushchev brand of communists for problems with the younger generation: Such people, “who are addicted to extreme egoism and hedonism, are not taking care of the younger generation; they are disarming them spiritually and exposing them to all sorts of social evils.”
²³

In North Korea’s case, it was very difficult for a foreigner to judge how well the regime had succeeded in achieving its goal of casting all the young in the same mold. My interpreter, Han Yong, seemed, a fairly typical representative of the earnest and zealous Kimilsungists of his generation, a star product of the educational system that he was showing me. He was a twenty-nine-year-old senior at the Foreign Languages University, majoring in English. He and his entire class had been mobilized to interpret for tournament visitors. Han hoped to become an engineer, he said, and studied English because it would help him “look at what others have done and apply the best to Korea.” For his engineering training, he planned to take a correspondence course. Han said he wanted to marry, and had a bride picked out, but thought it “better to wait, since I returned to school at an old age.” (He didn’t say so, but presumably he had served in the military before college, as was typical.) Han said his proudest moment had been joining the Korean Workers’ Party in 1973.

Otherwise, I could see three- and four-year-olds in the accordion band
²⁴
at the September Fifteenth Nursery in Pyongyang who had obeyed the Great Leader’s dictum that every child should learn to play a musical instrument. The youngsters employed precisely the same technique as all of the uncounted other youthful accordionists in the country—smiling, cocking their heads, keeping eye contact with the audience—as they pumped out a passable melody. Then there were the groups of red-kerchiefed children’s corps members marching to and from school in formation, saluting passengers in passing cars, halting to perform community cleanup projects.

A boy assembling a miniature electric motor in a class at the Pyongyang Children’s Palace might say during an interview, as twelve-year-old Jong-hyun did, “When I grow up I want to become an electrician because electricity is very important in building our country into an independent and powerful country, according to the teachings of the Great Leader.” Still, I could not go out freely and talk at random with young adults who had spent most of their lives being indoctrinated, to see how much of it had taken.

Instead, I had to settle for contacts with the North Koreans whom the authorities had placed in my path—Lee Yong-ho, for example, who identified himself as a twenty-six-year-old doctoral candidate in molecular biology at
Kim Il-sung University, one of the one million intellectuals the regime claimed to have produced in its push to develop the country.

Finding Lee on a weekday afternoon was unavoidable. For days I had been asking my handlers to let me meet some university students, and on this afternoon they finally told me it was time to visit the university. When we arrived, however, the campus was deserted. I asked them where all the students had gone. In a seminar, was the reply. “Twelve thousand students in a seminar,” I marveled. “Amazing!” I contemplated the possibility that the authorities had gone to the trouble of emptying out a campus just to make sure I would not have any unscheduled conversations with the wrong people. Anyhow, when my handlers ushered me across campus and up several flights of stairs to a particular laboratory, Lee just happened to be sitting there—in a business suit, with a miniature, gold-framed, enameled portrait of President Kim pinned to his left lapel—peering intently at a textbook.

A bull-necked boxer, soccer player and veteran of army service, Lee in response to my questions professed a complete lack of interest in the two prime interests of 1970s students in the West: protest and sex. As for sex, he said that he had neither girlfriend nor wife, and never thought of such things even though the university was coeducational. “I am a student, so I am studying now, concentrating all my efforts on my subject,” he said. Student dissent, Mr. Lee said, would be unthinkable at Kim Il-sung University. There were not even any campus issues, much less national issues, to arouse rebellious feelings. “Among our students you can’t find a single one who believes there is some element to be criticized,” he said.